There was no intent to create life at all, let alone human life. As macgyver said the conditions for life evolved naturally in the course of the evolution of the universe.

what amazing faith in chance you have. one to 10^174 btw….... really amazing…..

I am afraid that your god , any god, has no emotional investment in the universe and its infinite variety of expression. Which makes any attempt to “contact” a God, a FSM, a Potential field futile and a waste of time. If your delusion makes you happy, great. But I believe more in the conscious intelligence of a slug than in the conscious intelligence of the universe.

you have not answered my question.

Potential. Potential equals your god in every respect except for emotion and motive.

Please back up your assertion.

—“Naturalism? no, no, no, can’t be, the second law of thermodynamics forbid the natural functions of the universe.
I have not made this assertion.
Yes you did (see #56).

You are asserting there was energy, existing in all eternity, beyong our universe. If i got that wrong, please correct me.

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Re-read one of the quotes you offered: “the values of these numbers seem to have been very finely adjusted to make possible the development of life”

‘Seem to’ certainly doesn’t equal “fact”. Neither you nor anyone else in the world can say that “it’s a fact that the variables in the universe have been finely adjusted with the intent of making life possible”.

If you’d said, ‘the fine tuning argument seems plausible to me’, that would be a different thing entirely ~ and something I would definitely ‘keep the door open’ to…...but stating that a speculative hypothesis is ‘fact’ reveals an egregious lacking in your critical thinking skills. That, or wilful ignorance/dishonesty.

In theoretical physics, fine-tuning refers to circumstances when the parameters of a model must be adjusted very precisely in order to agree with observations. Theories requiring fine-tuning are regarded as problematic in the absence of a known mechanism to explain why the parameters happen to have precisely the needed values. Explanations often invoked to resolve fine-tuning problems include natural mechanisms by which the values of the parameters may be constrained to their observed values, and the anthropic principle.
The necessity of fine-tuning leads to various problems that do not show that the theories are incorrect, in the sense of falsifying observations, but nevertheless indicate that a piece of the story is missing. For example, the cosmological constant problem (why is the cosmological constant so small?); the hierarchy problem; the strong CP problem, and others.
An example of a fine-tuning problem considered by the scientific community to have a plausible “natural” solution is the cosmological flatness problem, which is solved if inflationary theory is correct: inflation forces the universe to become very flat, answering the question of why the universe is today observed to be flat to such a high degree.

What’s wrong with keeping a door open as long as we don’t have an unequivocal answer/explanation for the thing in question?

How does ‘keeping a door open’ negatively affect anything? To me, all that translates to is “working with the provisional conclusions we’ve arrived at, while staying ‘open’ to the possibility of new evidence”

I’m not seeing any real ‘problem’ here.

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And with that, you still haven’t addressed what I’ve asked of you.

Which was: point to where I’ve asserted that there are provisional conclusions that lead to philosophical naturalism.

Quoting my own words back to me, words that make absolutely NO mention of philosophical naturalism at all, is a complete non sequitur.

Show me where I’ve asserted that any conclusions (provisional or otherwise) lead to or substantiate philosophical naturalism.
Anywhere.

Can you do that? Can you just respond to that very simple request?

It is implicit to me that “working with the provisional conclusions we’ve arrived at, ( the conclusions you refere, is in regard of philosophical naturalism ) If you meant something else, please correct me.

“Tools have enabled us to think intentionally, to make things and to do things to create a world that fits us better. Now imagine an early man surveying his surroundings at the end of a happy day’s tool making. He looks around and he sees a world which pleases him mightily: behind him are mountains with caves in - mountains are great because you can go and hide in the caves and you are out of the rain and the bears can’t get you; in front of him there’s the forest - it’s got nuts and berries and delicious food; there’s a stream going by, which is full of water - water’s delicious to drink, you can float your boats in it and do all sorts of stuff with it; here’s cousin Ug and he’s caught a mammoth - mammoth’s are great, you can eat them, you can wear their coats, you can use their bones to create weapons to catch other mammoths. I mean this is a great world, it’s fantastic…..

Man the maker looks at his world and says ‘So who made this then?’ Who made this? - you can see why it’s a treacherous question. Early man thinks, ‘Well, because there’s only one sort of being I know about who makes things, whoever made all this must therefore be a much bigger, much more powerful and necessarily invisible, one of me and because I tend to be the strong one who does all the stuff, he’s probably male’. And so we have the idea of a god. Then, because when we make things we do it with the intention of doing something with them, early man asks himself , ‘If he made it, what did he make it for?’ Now the real trap springs, because early man is thinking, ‘This world fits me very well. Here are all these things that support me and feed me and look after me; yes, this world fits me nicely’ and he reaches the inescapable conclusion that whoever made it, made it for him.

This is rather as if you imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, ‘This is an interesting world I find myself in - an interesting hole I find myself in - fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!’ “

point to where I’ve asserted that there are provisional conclusions that lead to philosophical naturalism.

Quoting my own words back to me, words that make absolutely NO mention of philosophical naturalism at all, is a complete non sequitur.

Show me where I’ve asserted that any conclusions (provisional or otherwise) lead to or substantiate philosophical naturalism.
Anywhere.

Can you do that? Can you just respond to that very simple request?

It is implicit to me that “working with the provisional conclusions we’ve arrived at, ( the conclusions you refere, is in regard of philosophical naturalism ) If you meant something else, please correct me.

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I’ll correct you easily: the part in bold is YOUR injection, not mine. You projected that, I didn’t say it. In fact, I very specifically said that I was talking in general terms there. If I wanted to add the phrase “and thefore, philosophical naturalism”, I would have. But I didn’t.

Please make some effort to read more carefully in the future ~ we could have saved about 2 pages of nonsense if you’d admitted that you presumed something that wasn’t asserted at all.

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‘we are so fundamentally constituted of desire that we go on hearing music…...even though we know the band is gone and the stage is silent’

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That’s it? Are you simply dismissing it because it wasn’t said yesterday? ‘Old and tired’ is not a refutation.

I have a ‘new’ version (based on my own personal observation). Imagine floorboards on a verandah ~ where a little dirt, and maybe some water, have accumulated, possibly because the space between the boards is slightly larger than between others or isn’t entirely sealed (perhaps due to wear or less-than-perfect workmanship). Imagine then, that the wind blows some seeds from a nearby lawn/garden around…...all over the verandah, the lawn, the driveway…..and one or more seeds gets caught in this slightly-larger/perhaps not entirely sealed space between floorboards, where a little dirt and moisture have accumulated, for the same reason…....and as a result, a tiny flower sprouts up.

can you imagine what that flower might think, if it could? looking around itself and realizing that it’s the only bit of life on the verandah floor?

it could very well think “hey, i must be VERY special! this spot must have been MADE for me, since it happened to have the rare combination of things necessary for me to have popped up here!”

are you suggesting that that flower is necessarily right about that conclusion, Adonai888?

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‘we are so fundamentally constituted of desire that we go on hearing music…...even though we know the band is gone and the stage is silent’

The older I get, and as I become more experienced with these issues, the less inclined I am to try to discuss these things with people who plainly do not understand science or its methods; and whose biases in favor of believing a just-so story are so obvious.

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I cannot in good conscience support CFI under the current leadership. I am here in dissent and in support of a Humanism that honors and respects everyone.

There was no intent to create life at all, let alone human life. As macgyver said the conditions for life evolved naturally in the course of the evolution of the universe.

what amazing faith in chance you have. one to 10^174 btw….... really amazing…..

Nooo, you still don’t get it do you? Any kind of structure which would have led to something, anything, would have had the same odds. We are not even lucky in that respect, we just are a result of specific natural conditions in a specific place in the universe, on a specific planet, in a specific place which allows for a certain form of life to evolve. Personally I am certain that there are other life forms in the universe, in planetary systems with different properties, which would disprove your assertion of a finely tuned universe or finely tuned conditions for life to evolve.

Ok, let me ask you this, what are the odds that Hydrogen (and other elements) is formed in an almost infinite large energetic (chaotic) explosion? I can’t tell you, perhaps there are some here who can, but I bet the odds are close to 100%.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nucleosynthesis
Thus, while the BB was a chaotic event, it created some orderly structures. Once you have an orderly simple structure it is but a small step to the formation of complex structures. This is the observed and verified record of the evolution from simple to complex systems. There seems to be no “irreducible complexity” anywhere.

I am afraid that your god , any god, has no emotional investment in the universe and its infinite variety of expression. Which makes any attempt to “contact” a God, a FSM, a Potential field futile and a waste of time. If your delusion makes you happy, great. But I believe more in the conscious intelligence of a slug than in the conscious intelligence of the universe.

you have not answered my question.

Which question?

Potential. Potential equals your god in every respect except for emotion and motive.

Please back up your assertion.

Except for emotion and motive name me one property of god that cannot be used as a property of Potential. If you think you know all the expressed and implied meaning of the word, I suggest you study it more closely. It is one of the most profound words (in any language) created by man. IMO, the recognition of a latent natural excellence in everything is one of the greatest discoveries ever. But it has nothing to do with a scriptural god.

—“Naturalism? no, no, no, can’t be, the second law of thermodynamics forbid the natural functions of the universe.
I have not made this assertion.
Yes you did (see #56).

You are asserting there was energy, existing in all eternity, beyong our universe. If i got that wrong, please correct me.

No I did not. I am saying that the potential for energy existed outside of time or space, it is a natural cosmological constant.
My intepretation of Bohm’s Implicate where he said that pure potential sprang from a still greater energetic field, is that his use of the word energetic means “dynamic’ even though it had no physical properties.

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Art is the creation of that which evokes an emotional response, leading to thoughts of the noblest kind.W4U

The older I get, and as I become more experienced with these issues, the less inclined I am to try to discuss these things with people who plainly do not understand science or its methods; and whose biases in favor of believing a just-so story are so obvious.

I have at times drifted toward the same point of view. The folks on the extreme are not interested in a discussion. They hear only what they want to hear. They are simply looking for a soap box upon which to bloviate. It would be easy to give up entirely except that most people are not at the extreme and I still think we need to fight the endless fight in support of science, logic, and reason so as not to relinquish the floor to those who argue in favor of foolishness.

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For every complex problem there is a solution that is simple, obvious,.... and just plain wrong